Tag: Jeremy Clarkson

Forgive me for not knowing until now who the Chicken Connoisseur is. I am in my 30s and I still haven’t got my head around the many millions of creative ways people use YouTube and how they have an immediate connection with their audience that the old dinosaurs of terrestrial TV can only dream of. Superstars are born, made fantastically wealthy, and crash and burn overnight. This much I know is true. I also know I’m playing catch-up. I swear I was standing in a Blockbuster choosing which video to watch just last week, but of course that was at least a decade ago.

So kudos to Channel 4 for giving Elijah Quashie his own TV series. This is a guy from Tottenham who made his name in 2016 reviewing chicken shops in The Pengest Munch. Important work, steering the nation away from disappointing fast food. He’s a critic who knows what he likes and he’s happy to give his opinion delivered in his own authentic style. There’s a lot of working class black slang going on here, but it all makes sense. Although again, I did have to look up peng which means handsome or fit as in “This is the pengest penguin in the world” which I’d pay good money to hear David Attenborough say on Blue Planet.

So this is it. The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Amazon picked up the wayward Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond and threw a considerable sum of money at The Grand Tour aka Top Gear on the road. Episode one starts with Jeremy leaving the BBC and rainy grey old England behind in a made-up back story to romanticise the end of the old show. No he wasn’t sacked!, they’re desperate to remind us, it was just his contract wasn’t renewed! Haha! Because Jeremy Clarkson hit someone who worked for him. He got wound up for an incredibly pathetic reason and took it out on an underling. Haha! Because bullying in the workplace is fine. Hahaha he’s such a lad! Top bantz.

Anyway, with the past glossed over, his co-presenters appearing from nowhere and an insipid version of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ playing in the background we arrive in the Californian high desert at Burning Man Festival. They then spend a few minutes making the whole festival look and sound utterly boring. It seems to be chock full of podgy pasty white people, who no doubt leave a violent shade of lobster red. On stage we can swiftly tell that these guys are many things, but they are not rock stars or even stand-up comics. They’re at great pains to introduce each other as motoring journalists. So why do they have to do it so awkwardly on a big stage?

Grrr! Arrgh! It’s new guest blogger Jontosaurus! When he isn’t drunk on cider and driving tractors in sleepy old Somerset, the enigmatic and endangered Jontosaurus likes to watch anything with zombies or aliens in it, anything with explosions, or anything with explosions and aliens and zombies all combined. His favourite shows at The Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black, Robot Wars, Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, and anything with a good story and compelling characters.

He is also writing a sci-fi novel entitled “Deimos Has Fallen” which features aliens, space zombies and explosions.

Visit him at his blog, but first – why is everyone excited about Robot Wars?

Back in the 1990s, we all got a severe shock to the system when the BBC announced a new game show entitled Robot Wars. It was a concept that they had taken from our friends across the pond, who had been televising robotic destruction for a few years already, and they adapted it for British audiences. Series 1 saw Jeremy Clarkson – still an unknown and over a decade away from punching a man in the face over a sandwich – presenting a show, and Phillippa Forester wearing an outfit that wouldn’t look out-of-place in an S&M dungeon as she trundled about the ‘pit’s talking to the roboteering teams and pretending to be impressed by their creations.

Jeremy Clarkson – original Robot Wars presenter and violence fan

In its infancy, this show was just hilarious – a demonstration of both the brilliance and eccentricity of the teams behind the machines. For every revelation such as eventual champion Roadblock, there were terrible contraptions such as Prince of Darkness, a box on wheels with wooden armour, exposed rubber wheels and a paint job that looked as if it had been done by a five-year-old… whilst they were in a deep sleep.

The Top Gear reboot was going to be such a big event it was unavoidable. Everyone was going to have a loud and aggressive opinion about it so last night I found myself putting it on at 8pm sharp, telling Mr H not to get too used to it. Neither of us drive, so it’s pretty difficult to be entertained by what is essentially a car review show.

As far as I can tell, Top Gear has always been awful. Either too serious, too factual and too boring in its initial inception and then after the 2002 relaunch too stupid, too loud and too macho. The presenters were men old enough to know better running around growling politically incorrect nonsense and shouting their surnames at each other like retarded public school boys.